


When Light Creeps In

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Series: Jaime and Brienne and What We All Deserved [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Brienne is the Best, Canon through first part of 8x04, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Healing, Honestly its wholesome, Implied Sexual Content, Jaime Coping with Some Shit, Past Abuse, Past Cersei Lannister/Jaime Lannister, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Touch-starved Jaime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 19:42:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19324813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: Every morning, Jaime Lannister wakes in a panic.All his life, to be found in bed with the woman he loves meant death and war and the collapse of his family.But now he's in Winterfell. His children and family are long gone. Cersei is a thousand miles away and the bed he shares is not only safe, but should be a comfort.Every morning, Jaime, Lannister wakes in a panic.





	When Light Creeps In

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, folks! 
> 
> Thanks for checking this out! I hope you enjoy! Please R and R, let me know what you think :)

His eyes had opened the last two mornings and, in spite of all that he knew, he had sprung from the bed instantly. His heart racing, soles of his feet scraping the hard stone floor until both of them were covered in scratches. It was not until he reached his breeches that he stopped, hand wrapped deep in the leather, and realized how wrong he was. That he could feel a pair of eyes on him, not ones that would see his or his sisters or their children’s heads mounted on spikes at the gate, but a pair of confused, still-sleepy blue eyes that were deep-set with worry.

He had always looked back at her. How to say that he wasn’t trying to leave? That these weren’t the actions of a sober, regretful man but instead one that had spent the entirety of this part of his life living for someone else? So he hadn’t explained it. And instead, he had uncurled his fingers from the leather breeches, taking his time to give his heart time to slow down, and rejoined her on the bed. Above the fur, his body warm enough from the pulse pounding through it. The cuts on his feet ached as the pressure of him standing left them.

That first morning had been quiet. Neither of them had known how to start the conversation between them, but there had been a different sort of intimacy. The bruise that had been forming on her cheek had darkened overnight into a heavy bruise finally, settled with a yellow tinge around it. He had lifted a finger to it, tracing the skin between his knuckles over it and down to her jaw where an old scar blended in easily with the new. She had closed her eyes, lessening the tension he felt as the last of it left his body as he continued tracing his fingers down her body. Over scars, healed poorly under formerly freckled skin. Over cuts, newly shaped, and bruises that were beginning to fade. Finally, as his hand reached down far enough she had opened her eyes again, and pressed a kiss to his lips, pulling him overtop of her. When that had finished, she had lifted his arm, eyes fixed on his face as she pressed a kiss to scar over what had been his wrist and finally words had come to him.

The second morning she had sat up fully. She had kissed him as he climbed back into the bed. Not in the same way. Not with the same hunger. It seemed a test, to see if he was really there. To see what parts, if any of him, were real. And he had responded in kind, kissing her way down and over her body until they had missed the morning meal and it wasn’t until Tyrion had come looking for his brother that either had considered how hungry, how tired, how sore, how anything else they were beyond entirely captivated and in that moment.

This morning, however, was different.

“Jaime,” She said softly, her blue eyes not as troubled as they had looked that first morning, nor as disbelieving as the second. He let the clothing fall to the floor, knowing that this was something they had to discuss. That finally Cersei, her fingers wrapped deep around some long-buried put in his soul, had reared her head.

“I’m sorry,” He began, but stopped again. He stepped into his clothes and pulled his pants around him, feeling, for the first time between them, uncomfortably exposed. He walked over to the window where dawn light was peaking through. Enough to wake him on his side of the bed, just enough watery winter light to trick his eyelids into thinking it was a suitable time to leap from the comfort of a shared bed.

She stood as well, pulling a robe around her, the fabric dark blue and going just past her knees, loosely tied around the waist. “Do you still have Podrick getting up at dawn for training?”

“Jaime, if you are uncomfortable staying with me, Lady Sansa has not given away your room.”

His attempt to avoid speaking of this or to lighten the topic had failed, though he was certain that the person he saw walking towards the armory was one Podrick Payne. Though, in all truth, he seemed to be the only person awake besides a woman gathering a basket of root vegetables from the stores next to the stablehouses.

“I’m not uncomfortable—”

“IF you do not wish for people to know---”

He had to look at her then, and she stopped talking as he did, her eyes on the windowsill. He reached his hand over, careful pushing back a mussed bit of hair that, if it were allowed to grow, would be a straw-colored curl, and curved his hand gently around her cheek, thumb brushing her jaw as gently as he could manage. So gentle, he thought it might break them.

“I’ll tell the whole fucking castle if you would like,” His voice was so soft it was almost a whisper, but clear between them, “I’ll shout it from what’s left of the battlements. I’ll tell every man, woman, and child here, Brienne. Right now, if you’d like me, too.”

Her eyes looked up to his, striking in their color and in their intensity that had not wavered since he had first seen them. On her face was a ghost of a smile, “I don’t think that’s prudent.” She said softly in reply before raising both of her hands to close them over his. “Something is bothering you.”

“Yes,” Jaime said, looking at their conjoined hands. Her grip was light, her fingers calloused in the way he had come to recognize they were when held him close, when she explored his body in gentle measures, when she gripped his skin and gasped his name as he moved inside her.

“Please,” She said, and let their hands drop. She kept one of them together and threaded her fingers through his, holding them together, barely touching but linked together.

“Not long ago, for me to be in bed like this past dawn would have been a death sentence,” He couldn’t – wouldn’t – look at her.

“You’re safe here,” She answered. Almost too quickly, and if she hadn’t been there, if the pair of them linked together hadn’t felt so much like the forging of an electric chain, then he wouldn’t have believed her. But it was her. Brienne. The only person whose words truly meant what they were supposed to.

“Not just for me,” He said. And now he could look at her, into her eyes that did not darken even though it could not have been an easy conversation for her to have now. To feel, as he had felt for ages now, that there existed a wall between them in the form of his sister. To over him comfort now was to validate that they had been together, to acknowledge an old crime and calling of his that he had never been allowed to forget. “And not just for her.”

Where there was supposed to be feeling now was a hollowness in his chest. He had expected it when thinking of Cersei, but it came instead when thinking of his children. He had sired three, but he had never been a father. Only for a moment to Myrcella, who’s last act had been one of forgiveness and who had only seen him fail her as she died in his arms. Never to Joffrey, who’s actions he had realized long ago were no accident and never to Tommen, who had always been at a distance as he was never bred to rule or to fight or to Lord or do any of the things that any of them had ever wanted Jaime to be good at. He no longer mourned them; he had never truly known them. They were Cersei’s children, truly, and he had been pulled into a web of her hatred of Robert Baratheon and tied down by their birth. He didn’t resent them. Only the hollow feeling in his chest where grief should have lived.

“When I wake up, I’m in Kings’ Landing again. I can feel Varys and his little birds in the walls and Pycelle and his beady little eyes and I panic,” He feels his breath start to push at his chest, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Jaime,” Her voice is like water over his head, clearing it, “That life is past if you chose for it to be.”

He blinks, and all of his feelings bubble to the surface. Love and self-loathing, the tenderness he feels towards her and the bite in his father’s words as he called him a disgrace, Cersei’s cold cruelty as she took what she wanted and left nothing for him to survive on and Tyrion’s pyre joy at seeing him in the courts at Winterfell after he had been allowed to stay. He imagines all of that, here with her, and all he can feel is warmth flooding through him.

“I am not asking for anything,” She says quickly and her pale skin flushes a deep red, “Only that you need not fear that, only questions of why you would bed such a woman to begin with-“ His lips stop her. Pressed to the corner of hers in an attempt to show her what he is unable to say at the moment. He wants this. All of this. He wants her.

On  the fourth day, he panics. On the fifth day, he panics and as he stands catches a rock in the sole of his foot, leaving drops of blood between the bed and his breeches and an ache that she presses out at the end of the day with gentle fingers and endless patience. On the sixth day he panics and is reminded of the rock’s interference in his daily schedule.

On the seventh day, however, he does not spring from the bed. He opens his eyes to the ceiling and stays where he is, feeling a heavy compression on his chest. Every morning, she has faced away from him on the bed, stretched out on her side of the bed all the way to the bottom. This morning, however, she is draped across him, curled around him. Her head is nearly on his shoulder, two of her legs on either side of one of his own, one arms tucked around the pillow and the other across his body. He feels the panic, as he does every morning, swell in his chest, but in the same breath it recedes.

And as it recedes, he lets out a long breath, letting the compression of her on his chest weight down his worries until they are no longer strong enough and vanish into the air around him. He is suddenly light, airy. He wants to wake her and kiss her and make love to her until the energy in him goes away. But he doesn’t. Instead he reaches an arm over, taking the furs haphazardly covering part of her and effectively covering both of them. Closing his eyes to all of those things and instead choosing to remember these things.

On the 10th day, she wakes before he does, a small smile on his lips when she looks up from where her head rests on him.


End file.
